


Progress

by Darkrealmist



Category: Magic: The Gathering (Card Game)
Genre: Animals, Biology, Body Modification, Card Games, Character Study, Demons, Elves, Evolution, Fantasy, Gen, Genetics, Hybrids, Magic, Merpeople, Meta, Mutants, Politics, Puns & Word Play, Ravnica (Magic: The Gathering), Science, Science Fiction, Violence, War, Wordcount: 100-1.000, Wordcount: 100-500, Wordcount: Under 10.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:48:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24406816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkrealmist/pseuds/Darkrealmist
Summary: On Ravnica, Prime Speaker Vannifar prepares the Simic for inevitable war.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	Progress

Progress

Author’s Note: Based on a pet theory of mine. Enjoy the story and R&R.

Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of _Magic: The Gathering_.

Card Reference: <http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=457339>

Summary:

On Ravnica, Prime Speaker Vannifar prepares the Simic for inevitable war.

* * *

Guildmaster Vannifar didn’t sleep. Never shut her eyes except to blink since accepting the ooze into herself, its thin, semi-translucent cnidarian tentacles coiling around the frills of her neck. Spiralling branches snaking the Combine’s ubiquitous sigil. Under her robes, the slime’s neuroboretum cluster fired off signals with anesthetized, crafted life.

So many visionary, transgressive paths captured the Clades’ interest. It took two brains – hers and the ooze’s – to measure them all.

By current ethical practices, the quondam, mistaken Vigian model of consumerist bioexpansionism no longer held a place in Ravnican society, if it could be argued (theoretically, not magically compelled) to have had a place _before_ the first Guildpact’s dissolution. Momir Vig’s pandering of bioaugmenting patents he said would improve people’s livelihoods resulted in the largest and only simultaneous mass maiming on Azorius record. Mutilation by commodification, superbly trademarked.

It was Azorius’ late Grand Arbiter, Augustin IV, who played focal manipulator.

And Vig got what he fundraised and researched hard for: An ooze capable of engulfing all of Ravnica and absorbing everything’s genetic material via his cytoplast biotechnology, were it not for Rakdos’ unpleasant bedside manner.

Project Kraj, the elf’s great “last experiment.”

Selesnya, during the interval the guilds fell, lost its quietmen, who the citizenry lynched in the streets for their role in the dissension.

But the Azorius Senate should have paid a steeper penalty. The gallstones on those hypocrites! Hiding House Dimir’s existence, when the criminals now also operated publicly. Perhaps some renegade Simic grafted a few extra pairs onto the lawmages.

Mimicking their creations, what it meant to be Simic was always in flux. An ever-shifting evolution, releasing stranger and stranger lifeforms out into the unnatural pressures of the city. Biomancers testing and overcoming the limits of possibility.

The old vanguard’s assault zeppelids receded into the depths. The new thinkers’ mystically conjoined krasis rose to the surface from Ravnica’s sunken oceans.

Zonots…Communities…The Fathom Edict…

Vannifar acknowledged the ideals of Zegana’s Utopian movement, but critiqued how slowly the movement worked. In Vig’s time, the Simic produced cautious distance among other guilds. The merfolk principles of the Holdfast and the Upwelling bred out this self-preserving advantage.

Simic bioengineers weren’t “stewards of nature” so much as “sea world attendants” anymore. Rakdos sideshows, without a satisfying splatter of gore at the end.

They’d become soft. They had to become Adaptionists. Resistant, yet flexible, like plax.

Kraj’s revivified plasm sieved Vannifar with vascular awareness.

They couldn’t stagnate. They required guardians. Strength through diversity.

The birthing pods and growth chambers incubated a superior breed of Simic.

War was coming. The Prime Speaker would ensure the Simic survived.


End file.
